Bequest Thomas Harlan

The bequest Thomas Harlan was given to the Fritz Bauer Institute in 2014 by Harlan's executor and his brother-in-law. The holding originally contained correspondence between Fritz Bauer and Thomas Harlan. Immediately after accession, these documents were separated from the rest of the material and are now part of the bequest Fritz Bauer. Also in 2014, the Fritz Bauer Institute was offered correspondence between Thomas Harlan and his partner Krystyna Zywulska as a deposit by the author Liane Dirks. This deposit became part of the bequest Thomas Harlan. Thomas Harlan (1929-2010) was born in Berlin on February 19, 1929, as the eldest son of the director Veit Harlan. His father was a popular film director during the National Socialist era and made several propaganda films, including the infamous anti-Semitic film "Jud Süß". In 1947, Thomas Harlan began studying philosophy in Tübingen but changed to the Sorbonne in Paris a year later. Here, he began working for several French broadcasting stations. In 1952, he travelled through Israel and the Soviet Union for several months together with his friend Klaus Kinski. In the same year, Harlan published his first play. In 1958, together with Kinski and Jörg Henle, he founded the Junge Ensemble in Berlin. In 1958, the theatre group performed Harlan's play "Ich selbst und kein Engel — Chronik aus dem Warschauer Ghetto" for the first time. The premiere of the play turned into a scandal as it mentioned the names of several Nazi criminals who had not been legally prosecuted until then. Harlan subsequently demanded their legal prosecution. As a result, one of the named threatened Harlan with action for slander whereupon the latter went to Poland to find more evidence for his claims. Harlan remained in Poland from 1959 to 1963. Here, he met the author and Auschwitz survivor Krystyna Zywulska with whom he became romantically involved. Through Zywulska's husband, Harlan obtained contacts to highest political circles and got access to archives that were otherwise closed to foreigners. On the base of the material found in the Polish archives, Harlan filed more than 2,000 criminal charges with the responsible German public prosecutors. Presumably through this, the young author came to the attention of Hesse's General Attorney Fritz Bauer. The two quickly became friends. Their friendship lasted until Bauer died in 1968. Harlan planned to write a comprehensive history of the Holocaust and the reintegration of former Nazi perpetrators in the Federal Republic of Germany. In 1964, however, he came into conflict with the new rulers in Poland and had to leave the country. He then went to Italy. He stopped his work on the planned publication in 1965, disillusioned after learning that one of the prosecutors with whom he had worked closely had himself been convicted as a war criminal in the Soviet Union after the end of World War II. Harlan now wrote various plays, novels, and short stories. In 1975, he made his first film "Torre Bella", followed by "Wundkanal" in 1980 and "Souvenance" in 1989. In 1999, Thomas Harlan fell seriously ill. He died in Schönau am Königsee on October 16, 2010. The bequest Thomas Harlan contains after description, demetallization, and filing 14 archival units with a total extent of 1.0 running meter. Apart from call numbers already assigned, the holding initially did not have an internal structure. Therefore, the processor Johannes Beermann-Schön completely reorganized the holding during indexing in August 2023. The structure conceptually follows the "rules for the description of personal papers and autographs" (RNA, Regeln zur Erschließung von Nachlässen und Autographen). The bequest is now structured in three sections: "opus" ("Werk"), "correspondence" ("Korrespondenzen"), and "collections" ("Sammlungen"). The "opus" section includes documents regarding Thomas Harlan's play "Ich selbst und kein Engel — Chronik aus dem Warschauer Ghetto". The "correspondence" section consists primarily of the Liane Dirks deposit and covers the letters between Thomas Harlan and Krystyna Zywulska. This part of the bequest can only be inspected with the prior permission of the transferor. The "collections" section mainly contains a collection of material on Thomas Harlan. It was compiled as part of the edition of the correspondence between Fritz Bauer and Thomas Harlan by the former head of the Fritz Bauer Institute's archive in 2014 and 2015. This part of the bequest is only partially accessible to external users due to the numerous copies from third-party archives.